Kaleidoscope Soul
by LunaBianca
Summary: After recovering from the Hōgyoku Rukia returns to Karakura. She settles deeper into the Living World and her separate identities are starting to blur. Nail color is her-very human-guilty pleasure. Mangaverse, Arrancar Arc.


Rukia finds and creates meaning in color and human ritual. Angst ahoy, 'cause Rukia's good at that. *wink* All musings take place during the Arrancar Arc, manga chapters 195-204.

**Kaleidoscope Soul**

.o0o.

Colors are light's suffering and joy. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

* * *

It starts with Yuzu. Rukia had previously noticed the colors emerge like spring leaves on Karakura's twittering schoolgirls, but she wouldn't have indulged herself without Yuzu's invitation. Nail color becomes Rukia's-very human-guilty pleasure.

Rukia enters the girls' room sucking on a juice box, ready to shed her school uniform and settle into the comfortable routine of "homework" with Ichigo. (Sprawling across his bed or curling up in her closet for reading, drawing and no 'rithmatic while Ichigo scowls over his desk and defies society's assumptions of his mental acuity and ambition.) She pauses in the middle of a susurrating slurp to cock her head at Yuzu's strange position on the floor, hunched over toes distended by a clinical-looking piece of foam.

"Oh, Rukia-chan. Want to paint your nails with me?" Yuzu wields the tiny brush with precision and efficiency uncommon for a twelve year-old; the color winking from her fingers and toes paradoxically underscores Yuzu's innocence and makes her seem more mature. The little girl understands Rukia's protests are all for form and soon she's showing Rukia how to load the brush with the right amount of lacquer and lay color down the middle of the nail first.

It becomes a Thursday afternoon ritual, painting her toes with Yuzu while Karin is out playing football intramurals. She keeps the activity secret for weeks. Rukia only adorns her feet and perpetually wears socks, slippers or tabi, and Ichigo is so pleased to hear Yuzu's chiming laughter overlay the low murmur of Rukia's voice that he doesn't even eavesdrop on them. It has absolutely nothing to do with his phobia of anything remotely girly. Not at all.

* * *

Staring at her unnatural toenails as water sluices over her and down the shower drain Rukia can almost believe she's a real girl. Not a ghostly street urchin-turned-god stuffed into a gigai. Not a soldier distilled into muscle memory, utility, and implacable duty. Not a pretender to the Kuchiki throne.

Somehow during her first two months in Karakura-months dominated by the anguish of separation from her zanpakuto, her desperation to simultaneously throw Ichigo into battle and keep him alive, the psychological drain of infiltrating a culture with incomplete (or downright erroneous) intel-a stolen closet became a home more _Rukia_ than any she's known in the afterlife, her true reality.

Painting her toenails settles Rukia into her Living World self, as if a little lacquer can lock in her fleshy disguise and root her to the Earth.

* * *

Selecting polish isn't about aesthetic but capturing something human. Rukia's fingers skim over tiny flasks of color and she takes home the ones that trigger an unpleasant warm pressure behind her sternum. A shinigami's life can stretch out for millennia and Rukia doesn't want to forget this, the people and places that are waking her up. Maybe she can paint the memories thick enough that they won't fade.

A glaze of sashimi pink for Yuzu, or glimmering gold, a glamorous echo of "borrowed" pajamas and dresses. The youngest is often dismissed as fragile, naïve, powerless. But it is Yuzu's tenacious nurturing that binds her family together. Rukia sees that it's not that Yuzu _feels_ less than her emo brother, abrasive sister or manic roommate/father, but she puts on her big girl panties and embraces the mundane-partly because it suits her, but also so her loved ones can continue to cope as they choose.

When Karin someday deigns to join in her twin's beauty treatments (no one withstands Yuzu's gentle entreaties for long, especially not a Kurosaki) Rukia is certain Karin will pick Astro Black. Not only because it's the least girly shade. Suspended in the inky blue-black is a muted galaxy in miniature, a universe invisible to passersby. Karin is blasé or mocking when it comes to the spiritual but inwardly she's obsessed with her otherness, her all-encompassing sight.

So many hues are wrapped up in Inoue: wasabi green, candy floss pastels, tempered chocolate. Wisteria and the turquoise of her hairpins. Rukia never sees anything but clear coat on Inoue's nails. It's a quirk of rare reserve in the princess, like the inverse of blaring color on a venomous frog. Inoue is impossibly unselfconscious of her looks and her dress-whether whimsical or sporty-is always utterly feminine. But it's as if Inoue believes nail color will be the accessory that turns unsolicited attention into advances, painting her as promiscuous, ditzy or docile; an easy mark. Extravagant beauty teaches wariness from an early age whether one is living in Inuzuri or the outskirts of Tokyo.

Deep maroon transports Rukia to a warm tile roof where a boy with puppy-large hands and feet watches the Mexican sunset with discontent simmering in his belly. And she finds an ochre orange that matches the stitch work on Chad's guitar strap. Rukia is drawn to the silent poetry of Chad. She knows a thing or two about violent hunger buried deep and the loss of a mentor. But Rukia grasps that the friendship between her and Chad-while genuine-will forever be informed by their respective relationships with Ichigo, and the unbidden comparisons linger.

Who would've thought a shinigami would want to mark herself with reminders of a Quincy? Metallic silver and royal blue polish are selected for Ishida, of course. Rukia muses he might be the easiest human for her to decipher. Family dysfunction, the weight of legacy and genius, battles for pride, and icy precision to distract from the passionate temper within-Ishida-san is an honorary Kuchiki. Rukia definitely doesn't understand her relationship with esteemed brother, but she is learning who he is. And Ishida is similar enough that time with either man yields insight into both of them.

Fuchsia reminds Rukia of Isshin's ridiculous dress shirts and hyper antics. Any obnoxious shade does, really. The man is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. And yet...Sometimes Isshin has old man eyes. Solemn with grief, the knowledge of his own insignificance in the current of time, hope that his children will live well and die peacefully. Rukia almost thinks Isshin has consciously disassembled in front of her and for her, as if confessing. She's pretty sure Ichigo and his sisters haven't seen "Goatchin" in quite the same way. Rukia feels a fond exasperation for Isshin and wonders how much of his personality is a ruse.

Other colors of the Kurosaki residence have burrowed into Rukia's heart: the nori green of the roof; the rosy background hues of Masaki's poster; dandelion walls; Ichigo's metrosexual purple clothing in the laundry.

There are no nail colors for Ichigo. It's a reflex, shying away from any reflection on who Ichigo is to her. He's too bright, too big and the reason she was and continues to be immersed in this human experience. Rukia doesn't want to orbit around one person (not again) but his gravity is undeniable. How can one or two colors commemorate Ichigo when he is the prism?

* * *

Rukia never applies red polish, for the same reason she never paints her fingertips: red is the color of blood, and her hands are eternally stained crimson.

* * *

Yuzu's getting good at embellishments. She painted Chappy's silhouette on Rukia's big toes this week! Kawaii!

Rukia doesn't want French tips again, though. The white rim is the color of snowflakes, water lilies, and a rabbit's soft fur. But every time Rukia's toes encroach on her peripheral vision she sees robes leeched of color, an ivory tower, and liquid bone erupting from where a heart should be.

* * *

Yuzu selects juicy plum polish for Rukia the first day they paint together. The saturated red purple is not juvenile or brassy and it enhances Rukia's pearly skin. It's a pleasant mainstream offering, much like Yuzu presents herself. The blonde is just getting to know Rukia and is still company careful.

After a few conspiratorial beauty treatments Yuzu is more spontaneous around Rukia and acting more like a preteen than a housewife. Rukia's changing, too.

Rukia has at least three versions of her Living World self: Ichigo's shinigami handler/partner, known to a tight inner circle of humans; Kuchiki-san, completely normal and innocuous schoolgirl (well, harmless to anyone _not_ Ichigo); and the Kurosaki residence Rukia. This last girl blurs the characteristics of the first two, playing a fictitious person but doing so with more reserve, a bit more honesty. Rukia still pours on the melodrama with the Kurosakis when it gives her an advantage, but as days go by she's beginning to interact with Ichigo's family in ways not strictly necessary to her mission, asking questions or participating in activities that punch holes in her Modern Japanese Woman façade.

For instance, Rukia is fascinated with mundane technology like toasters and the clothes washer and dryer, and she's given up feigning indifference. She binds her chest in the privacy of the bathroom but shyly asks Yuzu about her training bra as the two fold laundry Sunday morning. It's obvious Rukia has never made tamagoyaki or used a hair dryer or painted her nails before Yuzu involves her in these activities. And the way the pint-sized shinigami crouches down in front of the telly, rapt, as Chappy hops across the screen-it's as if she didn't grow up watching cartoons.

These domestic outtakes are rare, of course. Rukia spends most of her time with Ichigo (kicking ass and taking names) and those hours are the most authentic, the best fitting on multiple levels she doesn't wish to examine. She is a dedicated soldier, skilled and pragmatic. But sometimes...Yuzu's laughing at her own goofy joke or the twins are bickering over the toasty rice bits or making snide comments about each other's fashion sense and Rukia's eyes dim. An acrid tang coats her tongue as she's reminded she's been twice robbed of sisterhood, an infant dead before memory and abandoned after death.

Rukia doesn't ask why _she_ must bear the loss; life isn't fair in any dimension. But sometimes she cradles the bitterness to her chest as if it is a tiny bird, cooing a lament to her clasped hands before setting the feeling free.

Rukia will someday be ripped away from the pseudo sisterhood with Yuzu and Karin just as she herself will steal Ichigo from his family. Rukia's spiritual entanglement with Ichigo can only lead to martyrdom. Fate is a canny contemptible bitch, and Rukia her unwilling handmaiden.

* * *

Sometime in between Grimmjow's fingertips touching her diaphragm and his hand exiting near her spine Rukia thinks, _not __yet_. She's never felt so reluctant to die-there are just so many unanswered questions and human experiences pending for her. The revelation startles.

As Rukia crashes to the pavement her mind fragments and trivial thoughts tumble like beads in a kaleidoscope. Who will wear her gigai's clothes? Will Yuzu throw away her artwork when she cleans out the closet? Dammit, she has a half-finished juice box in the fridge labeled "property of Rukia." She hopes someone finds her nail polish. It would be a shame if all those feelings were forever locked in their bottles and forgotten…

Colors dim and Rukia's vision fades to black.

.o0o.

* * *

Thanks for reading. Does this hold together? All responses welcome; please do let me know what you think.


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